The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) launched a public research consortium named ENCODE, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements, in September 2003, to carry out a project to identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence. Recently they announced some science shaking results.

Back Story

âIgnorance is blissâ the saying goes and many who promote or adhere to todayâs scientific paradigms are in the position to best report whether or not this saying is true. Iâm not using the word “ignoranceâ in a pejorative sense but rather in the sense of Websterâs âa state of being uninformed (lack of knowledge).

Finding oneself in the state of being uninformed is common to most of us in some aspects of our lives but deciding to build up an area of science or to make scientific assertions built upon the foundation of oneâs own ignorance is a mistake thatâs likely to be made manifest once that ignorance is dispelled with a bit of the light of actual knowledge.

As an example, for years scientists did not know what the function was for a number of organs or structures in the human body. They could have said âwe do not know what the function of this particular organ or part in the body isâ. What they did instead was to build on the evolution myth by tying their ignorance about the human body into âscientific knowledgeâ claiming that these âvestigial organs or structuresâ were leftovers from the evolutionary past-which had lost their functions. Eventually, other scientists were able to discover important functions for each of these âvestigialâ organs and today, arguably, none exist.

Materialists and strict evolutionists believe that there is only matter and energy in the universe and that somehow that matter and energy was able to organize itself into planets, comets, stars and life. They donât believe in spirit, such as the souls of man or in God who is Spirit because such canât be scientifically quantified. There is however another sphere that exists apart from matter and energy that even the materialists have to admit is real. This sphere is called information.

Information exists and in fact is the basis of life itself. Information is non-material and exists apart from any method or material used to convey it. Information exists in copious amounts in the cells of everything living. This information, DNA, is a language which the living cell can read, understand and âobeyâ. This information provides the instructions for every facet of life.

âThe information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences.â..NIH

Information and language come from a mind; it comes from intelligence. DNA is such a language.

The âtechnologyâ conveyed through the language DNA is infinitely above any technology of mankind. The fact that this information could have only come from a superior intelligence should be obvious; whoever placed the language in the cells of everything living first had to have stupendous and incredible knowledge in order to implant it into all life.

If materialists and evolutionists gave themselves a moment to reflect they would realize that DNA is proof that God exists and so they refuse to reflect-and instead apparently spend their time trying to create counter arguments to the obvious.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft said :

âDNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.â
Bill Gates, The Road Ahead .

All of Gates far less complicated software codes had creators.

Anyone who was honestly considering whether or not God exists had no alternative but to consider DNA absolute proof of a Creator. The smallest cell of bacteria living requires to much information to have been formed by chance and that information is on a level well above anything man has concieved or built.

As I.L. Cohen, Mathematician and researcher said:

“At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt”……. I.L. Cohen, Researcher and Mathematician; Member NY Academy of Sciences; Officer of the Archaeological Inst. of America; “Darwin Was Wrong – A Study in Probabilities”; New Research Publications, 1984, p. 4

There is a small portion of the human genome that codes for proteinsâaround 2%. This area has been a central focus on gene studies. The function of the larger portion of the genome that does not code for protein has been a mystery. Materialists seized upon areas of the genome that were not as well understood and declared these areas âjunk dnaâ. Being ignorant of the function of these areas, they argued that they were evolutionary junk, left over from eons of evolutionary activity.

Francis Collins, at one time the Director of the Human Genome Project said the following regarding materialist scientists using their own scientific ignorance as a basis for building on the current paradigm in science:

âThere were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn’t seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as “junk DNA,” though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome “junk,” given our level of ignorance.â
Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

Naturally, Materialists Ignored Collinsâ Hubris Warnings and Those of Creationists

The term âJunk DNAâ coined by Susumu Ohnoover 40 years ago is quite obviously a pejorative term intended to suggest lack of design and thus; lack of a Designer-God. A typical evolutionist challenge to creationists have typically gone something like this:

âAnti-evolutionists: can you explain why God would make “junk” DNA?

A good portion of our genetic code has no apparent purpose … that is until you account for millions if not billions of mutations that no longer have a phenotype in modern humans.â…Evolutionist, Anonymous

Richard Dawkins, the worldâs preeminent Atheist said the following with unconcealed sarcasm:

âOnce again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.â (Dawkins: The Information Challenge)

âŚit is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes.* The Greatest Show on Earthâ

Although Encode wasnât about âpseudogenesâ there is increasing evidence that they have until now undiscovered function as well; Dawkins double downed and tripled down with this quote from âThe Greatest Show on Earthâ

âWhat pseudogenes are useful for is embarrassing creationists. It stretches even their creative ingenuity to make a convincing reason why an intelligent designer should have created a pseudogene â a gene that does absolutely nothing and gives every appearance of being a superannuated version of a gene that used to do something â unless he was deliberately setting out to fool us.â

“This week, 30 research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published online by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases. A decade-long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically speaking. Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes”

âLong stretches of DNA previously dismissed as “junk” are in fact crucial to the way our genome works, an international team of researchers said on WednesdayâŚâŚ

For years, the vast stretches of DNA between our 20,000 or so protein-coding genes â more than 98% of the genetic sequence inside each of our cells â was written off as “junk” DNA. Already falling out of favour in recent years, this concept will now, with Encode’s work, be consigned to the history booksâ

âWell, now it is the evolutionists who are embarrassed â or certainly should be. For 40 years, ever since Susumu Ohno introduced the term in 1972, they have been waving âjunk DNAâ in the face of creationists, asking why their Creator-God would have produced DNA with only 5% that had any function. Now they know, or are beginning to find out, that it wasnât that it was without function, but simply that they knew too little about it to be aware of what it did. In fact this mirrors exactly the blunder they made 100 years ago or so, when they claimed over 100 human organs were vestigial: remnants of our evolutionary past that were no longer functional. They were wrong with vestigial organs 100 years ago, and they have been wrong for the past 40 years with junk DNA. Will they never learn?â

âNow scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as âjunkâ but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.

The findings, which are the fruit of an immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases, which may in turn lead to new drugs. They can also help explain how the environment can affect disease risk. In the case of identical twins, small changes in environmental exposure can slightly alter gene switches, with the result that one twin gets a disease and the other does not.

As scientists delved into the âjunkâ â parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins â they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed.â

Monkeyâs Uncle?

Evolutionists have trumpeted the similarity of the chimpanzee genome to that of humans, claiming that since the chimpanzee DNA profile matched ours up to 98% (debated number) that this was proof of evolution. However, the 98% number related to the 2% of the respective genomes that code for protein.

Given that, the Encode Project findings indicate that the vast majority of the two genomes are totally unrelated. In fact the extreme differences between the two species non coding DNA regions is too large to have occurred in the period alleged to have existed between the supposed evolution of chimps and man.

The Conclusion of it All

William Dembski sums up both the reasons materialists have for designating portions of the genome âjunkâ and why finding so much function in the genome tends to eliminate the possibility for evolutionary explanations to be correct.

âdesign is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term “junk DNA.” Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism.

Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA.

If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as “junk” merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about functionââŚ.Dembski 1998

So far, the Encode Project and scientists working in this area have found function for only 80% of the genome.

It would now betray a certain, stubborn, anti scientific ignorance to believe function wonât be found for the entire DNA code-if the world stands.